The era of American dominance in world affairs is coming to an end. So says the latest assessment from the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence. Its report, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World", paints a picture just seventeen years hence in which, "the U.S. will find itself as one of a number of important actors on the world stage," playing "a prominent role in global events" but not the decisive one as in the past.
C. Thomas Finegar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council and the nation's top intel analyst said on Thursday, "The unipolar moment is over, or certainly will be over by 2025." World War II ended in a bipolar world. From 1945 to 1991 the United States and the Soviet Union dominated world events. When the Soviet regime collapsed the "unipolar moment" was created. The U.S. stood as the lone world superpower. Now, with the emergence of China and India, the reassertion of Russia and the consolidation of regional blocs such as the European Union, the pre-war multipolar dynamic is poised to return. An essential question for Americans is, how should the United States adjust to the coming reality?
The keys should be to cultivate self-sufficiency within and multilateral cooperation without. Internally, this is why it is so important now to embark on domestically-produced renewable energy in a big way. It is similarly why we must invest in restoring the national infrastructure to world-class status. The transportation, energy and communications grids especially need immediate attention. Fortunately, these are projects the incoming president-elect is committed to. Pursuing them will also offer the added benefits of internal economic stimulus in a time of recession. Health care and education need attention, too. It is a competitive drag on the U.S. economy to be paying twice as much per capita for a health system as the rest of the developed world while getting poorer results. Inefficiencies like this can no longer be tolerated. In education we are wasting too much of our human capital by making it financially unfeasible for so many of our young people to go to college. Our competitors do not have this problem. Obama's "school for service" proposal is a way to address this. It or something like it must be embraced.
Externally, we will no longer be able to bully and intervene militarily with impunity to get our way. To attempt to do so will only invite similar counterpressure from our international rivals, rivals whose influence and power will be coming ever closer to our own. To continue down this path would be to follow the path of earlier waning imperial powers such as France and the Netherlands, who futilely and at great wasted expense tried to hold onto their colonies in the wake of World War II. Instead, the focus of our diplomacy with the rising powers should be to lock in mutually beneficial arrangements on such topics as regional security, resource allocation, terrorism, immigration, trade, labor standards and the environment.
Iraq and Afghanistan should have shown us how costly and indecisive the war model of addressing foreign problems can be. It may be that extreme rivalry with the rising powers is inevitable, but it ought to be our goal to avoid that if possible and seek the win-win first. It is indeed welcome that the crude and myopic approach of the outgoing administration is giving way to the more forward-looking stance of the new one. Change is never easy, but it is coming. The only real question is how we will manage it: proactively and intelligently or reactively and wastefully. Now is the time to make the intelligent choice.
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